One of the reputed origins of the myth of the Pied Piper were the Children’s Crusades, events which supposedly took place around 1212 across Europe, when a visionary child-preacher is said to have inspired 30,000 youngsters to follow him on a military march to the Holy Land of Palestine and Jerusalem, to recapture it from representatives of an infidel occupying religion. Today, historians often dispute whether or not any of this actually happened, or at least accuse accounts of being highly inflated.
Children’s Crusades have certainly been happening up and down Britain during late 2023, ever since Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7th and Tel Aviv’s consequent military response. These birthed the ‘School Strikes for Palestine’ movement, in which thousands of children, some of them far too young to have any real idea of the issues at stake, have been groomed out of lessons and onto the streets shouting Islamist slogans by contemporary adult Pied Pipers.
The infants’ profound knowledge of Middle Eastern politics can be seen in photographs showing prepubescent boys brandishing placards of Pikachu waving a Palestinian flag and shouting “Save the Children!”, thus finally revealing the attitude even of hitherto politically neutral Pokémon characters towards the deadly conflict. What are Psyduck’s considered opinions on current events taking place in the Nagorno-Karabakh region, I wonder?
The Caped Crusader
The latest educational establishment to be targeted is Barclay Primary School in (Middle-)East London, which in late December saw exaggerated allegations that an eight-year-old pupil was bullied by teachers there simply “for being Palestinian”. A previous Children in Need non-uniform day had surprisingly seen pupils turn up not dressed in burkas and djellabas, as anticipated, but adorned with pro-Palestinian badges, flags and stickers on their coats.
A small number of families reportedly subsequently received letters home, warning their kids not to engage in making “extremist or divisive comments” about the war, as some evidently had been. I guess the rough translation of this might be “please stop your brainwashed child bullying the Jews in his class”, but who knows?
Either way, once an exaggerated, ‘false’ and ‘malicious’ account of all this had spread online, hundreds of parents and other adults congregated outside the school building (including one masked and caped individual who can only be described as a Palestinian Batman), raising Muslim flags from lamp-posts and forcing the school to close down for Christmas two days early.
Traditionally, most British schoolkids would have been delighted by this outcome, but these days I’m unsure if most of them living in the local catchment area even celebrate the festival. Were the children and parents involved truly British at all? The most telling quote was elicited from one demonstrator by Sky News: “We had a situation today where Israel is attacking Gaza. Why is it that they are not allowing an eight-year-old child to wear the badge of his homeland, of his heritage?”
Ah, so the true “homeland” of some Muslim children attending Barclay Primary School isn’t actually Britain at all, but Palestine? Will you be taking them back there any time soon, then, I wonder?
Ignoring the Warning Flags
The media have largely treated all this as a brand-new phenomenon, spawned post-October 7th, but this is not so. Thanks to shifting demographics, for several years now, Britain’s schoolchildren – who, proportionately-speaking, are far more likely to be Muslim than older segments of the population – have been protesting whenever tensions rise in the Middle East. Back when I was at school, the burning controversial playground issues were Liverpool vs Man Utd, Nintendo vs Sega or Blur vs Oasis; now it’s Israel vs Palestine, IDF vs Hamas or Arab vs Jew.
During previous Middle East conflagrations in 2021, for example, teenage students at Judgemeadow Community College in Leicester filmed themselves standing on tables outside the building and shouting “Free Palestine!” before plastering footage online. Pathetically, it then emerged the College’s headmaster, Jason Smith, had ‘allowed’ the protest to go ahead – possibly because if he’d said ‘no’, the kids would have done it anyway. According to Citizen Smith:
This was a short and limited gathering outside during breaktime where a group of students showed their support for Palestine. Staff were closely observing but didn’t intervene in order to allow students to have their voice about a subject they are clearly passionate about. Students were vocal and energetic but the event was contained, minimising disruption to others.
At least severe ethnic tensions between Muslims and Jews make a nice difference to severe ethnic tensions between Muslims and Sikhs in 2020s Leicester, I suppose.
Also in 2021, Allerton Grange Secondary School in Leeds had to be protected by police following adult rallies held outside. The institution’s head, Mike Roper, had held an assembly telling pupils off for wearing unauthorised ID lanyards with miniature Palestinian flags stuck onto them, telling them it was potentially “a call to arms” and “sometimes seen as a message of support for antisemitism” causing “a lot of distress” to certain carefully unnamed “minority” students (i.e., the Jewish ones). Perhaps Mr. Roper didn’t realise that’s precisely why some Muslims like it, leading to mobs turning up outside chanting and waving the forbidden flag in question. In the words of one picketer, the headmaster’s words were “shocking and inflammatory”. Unlike going around waving Palestinian flags at innocent Jewish kids, obviously.
Quaker Oafs
An interesting report into the issue from the think-tank Policy Exchange released at the start of December revealed the ‘coincidence’ that the latest wave of 2023 pro-Palestine school strikes had begun in Bristol, the very same place where Left-wing activist teachers had previously helped launch a series of school climate strikes inspired by those of Greta Thunberg. Campaigners associated with the Green Party (the traditional holy colour of Islam and environmentalism alike) and the Stop the War Coalition, it transpired, had been acting in solidarity with sympathetic kids and teachers, calling for successive school strikes each and every Friday (again, both the holy day of Islam and of the ‘Fridays for Future’ climate strike movement) until Zionism was eliminated peace broke out.
According to the Education Act 1996 (Sections 406 and 407), schools are supposed to be politically impartial, but not, it would appear, when the political issues involved are those fashionable ones the teachers themselves happen to personally agree with. When asked by the Guardian in 2019 whether it was justified to allow pupils to walk out of lessons to attend a Climate strike, this is what Toby Spence, then headmaster of a Quaker institution named Sibford School in Oxfordshire, had to say:
Well, let’s be consistent about matters here for a moment: if there’s “not a lot of point” in kids learning about Shakespeare or Pythagoras because the planet is supposedly about to burn to a cinder at any given moment, surely there’s no point in them all wasting their time learning about George Floyd, Mary Seacole, transgenderism or indeed the current plight of the population of Gaza, or even about climate change itself, right, Mr. Spence? I think we all know the answer to that.
And what if “the school community” (Freirean educational Newspeak for ‘the children’) “felt very strongly” about the creeping Islamisation of Britain and wanted to attend a Britain First march outside a mosque? Or what if some held sceptical views about the ‘climate emergency’, so wished to skip lessons to picket outside a coal-powered power-station which was just being newly decommissioned? Would you allow that, Sir, if you sensed “a great deal of exasperation” about the “myopic” political conduct of our current governing class amongst the pupils involved?
Diane Reay, a Left-wing sociologist (that’s a tautology, I think) and Professor of Education at Cambridge University, also thought children were justified in striking:
But, again, what if that “common cause” was one you did not approve of, Ms. Reay? What then? I would guess that, in that case, it should not be allowed after all.
Wombles of Wimbledon, Wombling Free Palestine!
One of the most telling stories from the contemporary Children’s Crusade came from Ricards Lodge Girls’ School in Wimbledon, whose Headmistress, Kate Page, had sent out a letter to parents following the October 7th attacks, telling them she didn’t want to see any ethnic riots in the school, and so, quite fairly, was banning protests or displays expressing support for either side in the conflict:
The escalation of violence in Israel and Palestine over the past few days has shocked us all. I am mindful of the fact that we have students, parents, carers and staff of both Jewish and Palestinian heritage who may have family, friends and community members caught up in this terrible conflict. … We want our school to be a sanctuary and safe space for all members of our community and ask all staff, students and parents to be mindful of the emotive nature of this conflict. … We have reminded our students that there should be no displays of flags or slogans by any member of our school community please, especially during this time.
Guess which side disregarded its part of the bargain? Despite Mrs Page’s orders, hundreds of students marched through the school grounds protesting against Israel nonetheless, understandably leaving the Jewish pupils – whose own march, had they disobeyed rules and organised one, would presumably have enjoyed far fewer participants – “feeling unsafe”. Here’s some footage, appropriately overlaid with musical Islamic chanting of some sort. I can’t understand Arabic, but I’m sure it’s just saying #BeKind.
Children shouldn’t be missing school en masse to go on protest marches for more-or-less anything in my opinion, whether I happen to approve of the particular cause in question or not. That so many thousands of them are now doing so for an issue which, up until relatively recently, was essentially a matter of fringe concern in the U.K., and certainly amongst U.K. schoolchildren, is yet another deeply worrying manifestation of the unmitigated folly of our current era of uncontrolled mass immigration. If you import the world, as has often been warned, you import the world’s problems, too.
If we keep on being led blindly down this alley by multiculturalism’s zealous Pied Pipers, then Britain as a whole, hopelessly divided, will end up looking very like a diluted, homeopathic version of Palestine and the West Bank themselves – albeit hopefully without all the tanks, bombs and missiles. Harking back to the most famous literary and folkloric figure to emerge from the days of the Children’s Crusades, when it comes to mass immigration, one day soon, it will be time for us all to pay the Piper. What happens when we find we can’t afford his fee?
If they really care so much about their futures, maybe some schoolkids should go and organise a big march against all this or something.
Steven Tucker is a journalist and the author of over 10 books, the latest being Hitler’s & Stalin’s Misuse of Science: When Science Fiction Was Turned Into Science Fact by the Nazis and the Soviets (Pen & Sword/Frontline), which is out now.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
How proud the Welsh must be for having such rational, switched-on, competent geniuses in the Senedd.
What an intellectual colossus.
Yes, especially since the Welsh have been complaining about the English for centuries, only to feebly lie down like doormats before Third World Invaders.
“Racism is, fundamentally, the belief that white people and their ways of thinking, culture, political systems and histories are superior to that of other ‘races’.”
That seems to me to be a racist statement so it would appear Maya Sharma is a racist.
Sharma is a Hindu Brahmin surname.
Brahmins are the highest in the Indian caste system, which is just like racism but based on ‘caste’ instead of racial features.
So perhaps Maya Sharma wants to pretend racist-like beliefs and behaviour are limited to white people?
And her definition is not a definition of racism.
Racism is discrimination based solely on race. The colour of the discriminator is irrelevant.
Racism has existed throughout history between many different races.
India is one of the most racist countries in the world. Your status depends on your skin colour.
Dark – low
Light – high
An observation. The reason greenhouse global greenhouse gas emissions are increasing is because most non-Western countries (the source of over 70% of such emissions) refuse to prioritise their reduction. This – according to politicians and climate scientists – is an egregious and disastrous error. The solution they say is for us (the UK and other Western countries) to exercise ‘leadership’ by setting an example. As such politicians and scientists are almost all white and the inhabitants of non-Western countries are almost all people of colour, this view would seem, if Maya Sharma is right, to be a blatant example of racism.
Good one! I’m using that.
Not really, because it’s based on the claim the we are – for historical reason – not superior but inferior to others and thus, must atone harder for our climate sins of the past. Eg, ‘green’ global funds fund construction of especially energy efficient coal-fired power stations by Japanese companies in India because it’s considered ok if coal-fired power stations are built in India.
For us, it’s supposed to become “Scrape by with sun and wind, you deserve no better!”.
Silliband has donated 11 billion to colonise the “underdeveloped” to achieve net zero.
How can he ‘donate’ to himself?
He clearly fulfils the criterion however.
And are you correct? I thought there is a £40 billion ‘black’ hole in our economy?
Is it ‘black’ because it is not going to white people?
Isn’t that just a tad racist calling him them ‘underdeveloped’?
There must be some sort of death wish in the Welsh people to make them persist in voting for governments that foster this kind of nasty propaganda.
When I was younger it was all about bigging up Welsh culture; Welsh language signage; dragons/mythology/ wild grey-haired female bards singing Welsh songs to harp music and all that kind of guff – but at least it valued the native culture and was interesting, and signalled self-esteem.
The pernicious drivel currently being promoted is designed to demoralise and subdue the native Welsh so they don’t dare react to their new colonisers, (who won’t be as warmly disposed to traditional Welsh culture as were the English back in the day, despite a bit of opposition).
Where’s the current Prince of Wales? Oh yes, he’s been captured and no doubt approves of this horrible woman and her ilk.
Or perhaps the people living in Wales have given up paying any attention to the clitter clatter of the political machine as it trundles along. It’s only when it does things that affect ordinary people (like the lower speed limit) that the political machine hiccups for a moment.
Yes you’re right. They’re just a bunch of irrelevant wankers.
You mean they vote Labour. 2TK used Wales as an exemplar for his government!
Why do these deranged people always look the same? They’re smug, fat and ugly as shit.
And some XX chromo at birth
I was definitely wondering if that was one of them ‘women’ with a penis.
Anyhoo, nice to know I’m not the only biatch in DS Town.
And clearly devoid of any knowledge of history or maybe I should just stop at the word knowledge.
“Racism is, fundamentally, the belief that white people and their ways of thinking, culture, political systems and histories are superior to that of other ‘races’.”
There is nothing racist in believing that our ways of thinking, culture, political systems (?) and histories are superior to that of other races. That is just fact. I am not aware of any significant areas in which non-whites have significantly improved the lot of mankind.
The greatest nation ever to inhabit planet earth has no non-whites in its history who made any impact. Fact.
And with a name of Maya Sharma it is improbable that this woman would have any understanding of such as the Wars of the Roses, the Civil War, 1745, Tolpuddle and numerous more events in our glorious history. Ill placed therfore to lecture true Brits on our significant history.
If this hallowed nation is not in your blood you will never truly understand us or our glorious past.
I am white, I am English, I am British. And proud.
I totally agree. I have blood from all four UK nations in me, two from one parent and two from the other. I am proud of all four and proud to be British. My British roots go back 100s, even over a thousand years, according to a genetic test. This island is my home – not just in my physical presence now, but deeply rooted in my psyche and soul. It is truly disturbing me what is going on at the moment.
My son started at Cardiff University last month, reading Medicinal Chemistry. I went to visit him a couple of weeks ago – his mother, who is Welsh, dropped him off. I had never been to Cardiff before. As a city it is lovely. Really spacious, with some fine old buildings, but the make up of the population really took me by surprise. The diversity of different nationalities and races was quite overwhelming. If I had been blindfolded and dropped there and asked to say where I was, based on the inhabitants, I would not have said Wales or the UK for that matter.
Thanks.
The towns here in the North West are grimmer than ever these days. Ashton-u-Lyne yesterday – it truly was like being in a foreign country. Awful, awful, awful.
I know what you mean. I was in Ashton-under-Lyne the other day.
I agree- though I do personally know a handful of foreign born people who live in England who love our country and 100% get what it’s about- and appreciate that all the more because those things are lacking in their own countries. But agree they are in a minority. Equally I am sad to say many of our fellow native born English men and women do not appear to love our country. More fool them.
I know what you mean about foreigners who love our country tof and I respect them but they are few and far between.
The foreigners clinging to their old ways of life, clothing, religions and languages have no place here and clearly feel no loyalty or gratitude. For these people we should facilitate a return.
Yup I agree
Can we send away some of those English born people who seem to so want our culture to disappear too? Funny that they have not left already
Good point re the wingeing natives.
“Anti-racism” is code for anti-whitism. “Decolonisation” means the colonisation of white countries by means of the destruction of white cultures and white history. “Institutional racism” was an invention of the Trotskyists in the 1950s who were attempting to smear the Western democracies as being the same as the Nazi regime.
They are all Orwellian terms designed to hide a tyrannical and racialist (i.e. anti-white) agenda.
Far Left agenda.
Hitler used to stupidly think all the world’s problems were caused by the Jews. This lady think the world’s problems are caused by white ppl. Plus ca change!
The madleft believe that whites are “world poisoners”.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/our-bill-for-ending-the-slave-trade-please-pay-asap/
Maya Sharma needs to give this article some of her time before butting in on the history of a nation about which I confidently predict she knows F A.
But don’t the madleft believe that all these inventions were stolen by wicked whitie? For example, I’m sure I read somewhere that in the 18th century the our ancestors went to Africa and stole all the steam engines …
“our ancestors went to Africa and stole all the steam engines …”
Nah, it was definitely Watt Tyler.
Not James Watt then?
Another word that has been redefined by the left
Her definition is the one that all the grifters use
“Racism is, fundamentally, the belief that white people and their ways of thinking, culture, political systems and histories are superior to that of other ‘races’.”
..and where this can be substantiated as correct, what is it then.?
The voters in Wales will have future opportunities to either end this bollocks, or further encourage it. It’s up to them.
Sharma’s theory is roughly is that she’s entitled to break into other people’s living room without invitation, crap in a corner and tell people who complain about that there’s something fundamentally wrong with them because she’s so “fascinating”.
Here’s your reply: Go back to where you came from¹. You’re not adding anything to our world or – for that matter – to the world at large at all and you’re not entitled to be a louse in our hair.
¹ Or go back to where the last generation of normal people in your family came from who were welcome here because they were normal people. Whatever applies.
Outrageous hypocrisy coming from that member of the “BRAHMIN GOD-LIKE CASTE” of India, who look down upon all other humans as inferior, especially all the castes lower down their racist scale than Brahmins.
Hypocrite Maya Sharma says: “ “white people, institutes and nations hold far larger amounts of power”.
— YES, IN WHITE COUNTRIES, AS IS ONLY NATURAL AND RIGHT!!!
Ethnic Indian people, institutes and nations hold far larger amounts of power IN INDIAN COUNTRIES, you nauseating Ethnic Indian hypocrite!
Whilst one cannot claim Sharma favours the caste system the point has been made here that as a member of the Brahmin caste perhaps Maya Sharma wants to pretend racist-like beliefs and behaviour are limited to white people?
Which if correct, as seems to be the case from her definition, it seems to me makes her a racist and in this context thus an hypocrite.
But tell me if I am wrong.
why does Wales need an advisor like this – why does she not give advise the Middle East countries who need sorting out but then she knows the reaction she would get – another grifter on the welsh tax-payers
Until the real racists get it through their heads that racism works all ways we will never be rid of racism.
It is rather ironic that a group of Museums seek to label all white people racist by denying the facts of racism: it works in both directions. Surrounded by the teachings of History and yet unable to learn anything from it all.
I suppose they are not even aware that racism is not simply a matter of colour. The most racist person I ever met is Indian, he loathes Pakistani’s purely because they are Pakistani’s. If that s not an example of racism I simply give up.
This woman, according to the definition of a racist, is typical of the genre:
“characterised by or showing prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism against a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalised.”
She makes all encompassing, insulting and ludicrously inaccurate statements about white people, yet she is pure as the driven snow?
Of course she is.
You have to keep in mind that these people aren’t really Marxists anymore but they stand firmly in the Marxist tradition of considering their ideological theories a science of human history, society and sensible future development thereof. She has been schooled in critical theory, especially, critical race theory and just repeats the tenets of that in the way which is currently proscribed for marketing them (that’s the “fascinating international stories” bit) without any own thought.
As advisor to the devolved government of Wales she’s, after all, a rather minor figure, and who is she that she wouldn’t question something the mankind’s finest minds have laboured to create?
This is not a definition of racism:
“characterised by or showing prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism against a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular racial or ethnic group, typically one that is a minority or marginalised.”
That version of ‘racism’ includes discrimination in favour of a person based on their race.
Britannica’s definition is better:
And in the context of its use to denote hatred, prejudice and discrimination it is about time it was extended to religion and nationality or else a new and better word is needed to describe discrimination on the basis of race, religion or nationality.
“Fred hates all Syrians.”
So as Fred’s hatred is based on nationality and not race or religion, Fred is not a racist.
Syria is not a nation. It’s a synthetic state created out of the remnants of some former provinces of the Ottoman empire inhabited by the usual mix of different peoples and tribes of peoples on finds in this area. Originally, it was a arabic tribal kingdom. But that was overthrown by Arab communists (Bath Party) a fairly long time ago and since than, it has been an increasingly less nominally Marxist tyrannis (still closely allied to Russia, though).
Fred hates all Syrians is semantically equivalent to somthing like Fred hates all Londoners.
England is not England. It is a sythetic state created out of the remnants of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes.
So your synthetic state idea does not work for me.
You can apply the same thinking to Iraq, Iran, Saudia Arabia, Egypt, Tunisia, Israel, Palestine etc.
This is a debate about the concepts of statehood and the nation which I am frankly underinterested in.
I didn’t quote this definition. It’s however, perfectly appropriate to include discrimination in favour here, because there is really no such things as side-effect free discrimination in favour. Discrimination is always for the benefit of certain people and to the detriment of all others. Based on their usual “if we were expected to live up to standards we expect others to live up to, this would lead to the absurd conclusion that we aren’t really better than those others” attiude, the woketurds call discrimination in favour of people they call white racism and discrimination to the detriment of these people affirmative action. But this “We dislike the first and very much like the other!” value judgement doesn’t change the fact that the mechanism is the same in both cases.
The Britannica definition is really just the usual woke grab bag of random crap: It starts with the assertion that human races don’t exist (implied by calling it a belief despite dogs are classified into different race based on much more superficial characteristics than people and nobody objects to that), adds a strawman to that by intentionally conflating races and species (the exclusivity claim nobody ever made), then, for some reason only known to the author, progresses to the essentially marxist assertion that humans don’t have instincts governing their behaviour but are born as blank pages every can be written on, something which has been disproved by biological science a long time ago (there’s a reason why woketurds just hate biology) and then closes with another strawman as there’s nothing particulary racist in the belief that some races are innately superior to others. One of the instinctive behaviours of humans (like all other animals, BTW) is that they believe their own people are more valuable than other people, ie, care more about their own relatives than about other people’s relatives. Bloody racist lot, they are!
I’m intentionally ignoring the “islamophobia is racism!” closing nonsense.
Flocking to white countries, why are black and brown people so keen on moving here? What’s wrong with their countries that they want to come here?Is it because we have a much better system? It is sinking now into their style of broken third world countries…..
So now we know,not just suspect, the definition of racism is only one way in the eyes of those that are promoting it. That I’m afraid to say is in itself racism. No wonder an adult debate cannot take place as the proponents are exhibiting complete ignorance on the topic which is their expertise.
And by the way I hope the project is in the medium of welsh.
“the belief that white people and their ways of thinking, culture, political systems and histories are superior to that of other ‘races’.””
Strange that some places have cultures that have created societies that are rich and free while other cultures have produced places that are less free and/or rich, and lots of people are trying to flee to these rich, free countries and trying to flee from those other cultures.
They could resolve the Racism issue completely by getting rid of all the artefacts.